As he struck the ground he experienced a curious tingle on the left side of his head above the ear—it was as though a hot needle had been drawn across it. The detective yelled and fired another shot to attract the attention of the other pursuers. Nellie was already down and ready for flight. She grasped Burgess’s arm and hurried him over and between unseen obstacles. There seemed to be no method of locomotion to which he was not urged—climbing, crawling, running, edging in between seeming Gibraltars of lumber. From a low pile she leaped to a higher, and on up until they were thirty feet above the ground; then it seemed to amuse her to jump from pile to pile until they reached earth again. Running over uneven lumber piles in the dark, handicapped by an absurd ulster, does not make for ease, grace or security—and wet lumber has a disagreeable habit of being slippery.
They trotted across an open space and crept under a shingle shed.
“Good place to rest,” panted Nellie—and he dropped down beside her on a bundle of shingles. The rain fell monotonously upon the low roof of their shelter.
“That’s a pretty picture,” said the girl dreamily.
Burgess, breathing like a husky bellows, marveled at her. What had interested her was the flashing of electric lamps from the tops of the lumber piles, where the pursuers had formed a semicircle and were closing in on the spot where the quarry had disappeared. They were leaping from stack to stack, shooting their lamps ahead.
“The lights dancing round that way are certainly picturesque,” observed Burgess. “Whistler would have done a charming nocturne of this. I doubt whether those fellows know what a charm they impart to the mystical, moist night. The moving pictures ought to have this. What’s our next move?” he asked, mopping his wet face with his handkerchief.
“I’ve got to get Bob out of the office and then take a long jump. And right here’s a good time for you to skedaddle. You can drop into the alley back of this shed and walk home.”
“Thanks—but nothing like that! I’ve got to see you married and safely off. I’d never dare look Gordon in the face if I didn’t.”
“I thought you were like that,” she said gently, and his heart bounded at her praise. She stole away into the shadows, and he stared off at the dancing lights where the police continued their search.
Far away the banker saw the aura of the city, and he experienced again a sensation of protest and rebellion. He wondered whether this was the feeling of the hunted man—the man who is tracked and driven and shot at! He, Webster G. Burgess, had been the target of a bullet; and, contrary to every rule of the life in which he had been reared, he was elated to have been the mark for a detective’s gun. He knew that he should feel humiliated—that he owed it to himself, to his wife waiting for him at home, to his friends, to society itself, to walk out and free himself of the odium that would attach to a man of his standing who had run with the hare when his place by all the canons was with the hounds. And then, too, this low-browed criminal was not the man for a girl like Nellie to marry—he could not free himself of that feeling.